Tag: quotes

Recently I’ve quoted perhaps too often Annie Dillard’s slap-in-the-face line, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives”. It’s a slap in the face because of its simplicity and because of its great importance. And the “of course” tucked so effortlessly in the middle because, OF COURSE it’s true, though we forget it every day.

But I’ve wondered too about the choice of the verb “spend”. It’s not something I noticed on first reading, and yet after having discovered Mark Slouka’s line about any “loathsome platitude” that compares time to money—“the very alchemy by which the very gold of our lives is transformed into the base lead of commerce”—I can’t un-see it. (Mark Slouka, of course, also tucks his line inside brackets half-way through a separate paragraph, as if it were too obvious to mention).

What does it mean to “spend our days”, and to “spend our lives?” It’s as if we have a savings account, and the trick to life is to not deplete the account too quickly. The commerce metaphor conjures subconscious ideas of frugality and the time value of money; save today, for every dollar saved today will be a dollar and a bit the next. Be smart with your account, because you’ll need to support yourself for years to come.

Metaphors are dangerous, especially those that enter into daily usage. Rarely do we reflect on how they might shape our thinking, the ways in which our minds come to take on the ideas embedded within them. And the greatest risk of all is that we do not ask whether the metaphor is apt; whether by analogising the most important thing we have—time—we are losing sight of what is really at stake.

We cannot “spend our days” in the way we spend money; we do not know how many days we have, our days are not comparable to one another in objective quantities, and we cannot save a day today and get a day and a bit tomorrow. Time and money stand opposed; to get one, we must deplete the other. And yet by saying that time is money, and that we spend our days, we forget that we are not merely trading apples for oranges; to think that way is to be stuck still in the realm of commerce, where decisions are merely orderings of preferences. Instead we come to think the only thing we really have, and the very thing we cannot count on, is merely a kind of purchasing power. Time is outside the realm of commerce entirely, for it cannot be purchased. It cannot factor into preference orderings like an iPhone can. It’s the most crucial thing that Michael Sandel forgot to include in his book What Money Can’t Buy.

Let us say instead, how we live our days is how we live our lives. Living is what takes up time. One lives life and spends money; one cannot live money, nor spend time, though for too long we’ve pretended we could.

About

Welcome. This is the personal website of Michael Moore-Jones. I'm a New Zealander and a Philosophy, Politics and Economics student at Yale-NUS College. I've previously studied at Yale University and ten other academic institutions in six countries.